Feb 11, 2011 15:30 GMT  ·  By

Groupon has had enough of the Super Bowl ads controversy and is calling it quits. It announced that it's pulling the ads altogether, so your TV and computer should be safe from now on. The ads provided a contrast between important causes like deforestation, the independence of Tibet, or endangered animals and the triviality and commercialism of everyday life.

The idea was to showcase that many times people are more interested in the little and mostly meaningless things that affect them alone rather than global, but distant issues.

Of course, coming from Groupon, a company dedicated to selling all those trivial, meaningless things, the message should be even more powerful.

That's the theory anyway, it turned out that people didn't get the irony, big surprise there, and got quite offended because, as we all know, some things you just can't joke about.

Groupon came out with an explanation, after the initial wave of criticism, and tried to explain its point of view and the fact that the company was involved with charities and social activism.

In fact, it said that the ads did more good than bad for some of the organizations fighting for issues highlighted by the ads. Greenpeace even defended the ads. It was to no avail though, people were offended and would not let go until they got their way.

The ads are gone from YouTube, from the official channels anyway, and the microsite dedicated to the campaign redirects to Groupon.com.

"Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people," Groupon CEO Andrew Mason explained.

"We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads," he continued.

"We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through," he said.